The Sun Will Come Out...Today!

After months of gray, foggy and rather depressing weather out here in the gulch, the sun has finally come out for more than 5 minutes...in one stretch!  We have actually had several, maybe even 5 or so, sunny and warm days.  So let me put it in perspective.  Our regular "summer" (June, July, August) weather is cold and misty.  This is good for our crops (lettuce and brasicas) and generally reflects (I think) healthy and expected weather patterns.  That's the catch-22: I wish it was sunny and warm because it's glorious and energetic but that would actually be asking for something that's not good.  So instead I try my best to deal with the seasonal affective disorder- like symptoms and wait patiently for the fall and it's summery weather.

Here's some gulch highlights.

• Flocks of teenage quails roaming about, sounding their hilarious distress signals and generally freaking out, when they're not taking dust baths or running away from you like repelling magnets of course.
• We have two late arriving baby ducks with their mum hanging out in our algae filled irrigation pond.  They are teens by now and it seems mom is confident in what she has taught them enough to leave them on their own sometimes.  They learned to groom, to dunk under water with their butts in the air and sleep on the floaties.  
• The bees are having a ball.  First the large bees come around and now it's the smaller honey bees.  You walk by a bush and it just looks like a bush, but it's full of buzzing!  
• You know what else is great about the fog lifting?  When there's no cloud cover I can hear the ocean again from my bedroom window.  Ahhh, it's like one of those sound machines but better, and free.
• We have been hearing crowds of coyotes howling, yelping, barking.  It's amazing.  Sometimes when the whole community is doing farm work on Wednesday mornings it sounds like a stadium of fans cheering us on. Very encouraging.
• This season it seems "distemper" is back again.  It generally affects dogs but also wild animals like foxes, raccoons, etc.  We have found two dead foxes which is very sad.  I will admit I am not sure the garden will be that sad if it kills off some raccoons because they ransack our apple trees every year. 
• Snapdragons are blooming, actually they're at the end of their cycle but it's been glorious.
  

We Never Think Death Will Come

Recently a good friend of my brother passed away.  It was unexpected and accidental.  Grant was 26 years old, a neuroscientist and a musician.  He was still close with a lot of high school friends.  These boys seem to have one of those lasting bonds that has the sweetness of childhood and the depth that comes with growing up.   I didn't know him well but the loss has hit me harder than I expected.  I think maybe there's a feeling that it could have been my brother.  And it's a reminder, an undeniable reminder, of how fragile we are.  It is not actually so hard to hurt these bodies.  I don't know about anyone else but I definitely feel like I made it out of my "youth" relatively in tact.  But I made some not so smart choices a decade ago that could have maybe turned out bad.  At the time I felt like I knew what I was doing.  That I was being responsible enough.  But what could anyone have done for me then?  What can we tell our children?  What will I tell my child?

Then we are all left with the question of how do you let go of someone?  You have no choice but to 'bury' them and move on.  But moving on sounds so harsh.  What is moving on if it's not forgetting?  And if you never forget how do you function?  It's something of a miracle that people come into the world and kind of a shock when they leave.  The depth of the pain reflects the heights of our love I suppose. I am not sure if it is any easier when someone dies at the socially expected times.  Maybe we never expect it.  Maybe we are never ready.  I am left with the feeling that all we can do for anyone is love them as good as we can and hope they take care of themselves as best as they can and not be angry when they're gone.

Here's a sweet little song from the band Icewater (Grant and his friends) directed by their high school friend Dennis.

My Facebook Breakup

Yep.  That's right.  I broke up with Facebook.  Actually right now it's more like a separation.  Divorce has not been filed.  Facebook gives you the option of "deactivating" or "deleting" the account.  Why might someone breakup with Facebook, it's the mother of all social networks!?  Well friends,
I was starting to feel a little..addicted.  My husband says, "but it's not even that compelling!"  And often it's not! So then why do I keep checking it?  Partly because I work in an office now in front of a computer so I have constant access, not just to Facebook but any number of other media outlets to peruse if I am bored.  When the thought came to mind that maybe I should get off the Facebook I felt...resistance.  Omg, it must be a sure sign of addiction! So what do we do in Zen?  We look at the places we feel resistance.  Why wouldn't I want to disengage from this e-world of friends, family and fun?  First, I have a mild fear of missing out (F.O.M.O.)  I want to see the pictures, hear the gossip, read the shit talking and follow all sorts of threads and links.  Second, for a while it seemed cool to get to see what old acquaintances were up to and "reconnect" with old classmates.  Third, I wanted to tell people about what I am up to.

But I started asking myself, what am I getting out of this activity I engage in?  I am checking in on this site several times a day but what is compelling me to do it?  Am I actually missing out on anything?  What is the nature of my sharing personal details with my facebook friends?  Am I getting some sort of validation every time someone "likes" something of mine or comments or posts on my wall?  This TIME magazine article called "The Happiness of Pursuit" has some interesting things to say about what social networking has done to our ability to be happy with what we have.  The author argues that not only do we often try to present our best self to everyone who sees it but that we compare ourselves to everything everyone else posts.  Without even trying to we are subconsciously comparing ourselves to people we may barely know or to people who lead very different lives and all of a sudden our job promotion or new bike doesn't look as great as your friend from the 5th grade's new Porsche.  The article was talking about how happiness can be significantly affected by how/who we compare ourselves to and that in this day in age it is much easier to compare ourselves with people who live very differently lives like celebrities, the top .5% etc, when back in the day we compared ourselves with people who were in our daily world.  It also gives this great suggestion of asking yourself  "Would you still engage in this experience if you could tell no one about it?"

So it's been almost a week since leaving the Facebook.  I'm not sure if I'm happier but it's nice to have one less distraction.  And I do think it gives me space to be more involved with my local life and the people that are in it.  It is also encouraging me to cultivate my important relationships more deeply.  We'll see if I go the distance and delete the account.  It does seem to be a nice way to see pictures.  Hmph.

Why I Love Mad (Wo)Men

It's a good show! It's a great show.  I am totally addicted right now as I catch up on Season 5 since I finally made it to the top of the wait list at the library.  It had been quite some time since I watched it (I finished season 4 when I was still in New Orleans!)  But starting in again, I was reminded of how good it is.  I think some people have their feelings that it is trashy or just perpetuates stereotypes, etc but I kinda think they're wrong and even if they're not it's ok to like something because it's entertaining.

The basic plot backdrop is an ad agency in New York City in the early '60s.  At this time the field was mostly men who drank on the job, smoked a lot of cigarettes and cheated on their (house) wives.  This show takes a particular agency and uses it as a lens to look at a thick layer of social issues.  The most in your face issue is the rising presence of women in the work force and the glaring widespread consequences of a gender power imbalance at home.  As you can guess the agency is full of men, some dashing, some rich, some are both and some are not quite there but want to be.  The agency is also full of sexy secretaries.  So let your mind wander to the expected relations between these two groups.   Then look further and you see one secretary, Peggy, who shows talent and gets promoted and then continues to have to prove herself.  Every day.  And having to put up with overt degradation under the guise of humor because she's one-of-the-guys.  So she has to pay dearly for being good at her job and one of her losses is her sense of being a "woman," she cannot both be one of the guys and a sexual, attractive human being.  We watch her fight with this in superbly acted and written scenes.  She also proves to be the main male character (Don Draper)'s sole
confidante or at least the one person with whom we see him be most himself, often providing the only moments where we see his vulnerable side, the side that makes him human and worthy of compassion.

Another main female character is Joan, the office manager.  The girl is deep.  She's highly sexualized

(beautiful, super curvy and plays it up), she is regarded as almost untouchable or out of every man in the office's league but also has a quiet affair with one of the partners, she is the master of subtlety, highly regarded for her paramount tact in pretty much any situation and she's smart.  It almost gets buried under her sexiness but it shows itself in such subtle ways that most of the men don't realize they are being played or manipulated by her.  Not malicious manipulated but...I can't quite put my finger on it.  She also kicks her young good looking husband out after a final straw.  And she does it so calmly with no room for being bullied or sweet-talked, careful not to fall victim to the "crazy emotional woman syndrome" that makes it so easy for the men to dismiss them.

Finally, a new lead female character is Meghan.  She started out as a secretary, moves up a little to copy editor AND marries Don Draper, the handsome, charming and emotionally messed up lead character.  His story runs deep, no spoilers but his past is dark and he has done much to "make" himself into the man he is (ie. he's got some skeletons in his closet!).  Pre-Meghan, he was married with three kids and it sefl-destructed and you see his current marriage in danger of going that same way.  There is love but he is not ready for a liberated woman even if he is sorta thrilled by it.  Meghan stands up to him but also acts out (check out the Howard Johnson scene with the orange sherbet), she's young and doesn't have the same maturity of Joan so it's painful to watch the emotional disconnect between her and Don.  You (meaning me) really want it to work out!  There's a glimmer of hope that she can show Don another way to be, to learn how to share feelings and for god sakes to stop being aggressive when he gets angry/defensive.  

Just like Meghan at Feminist Current says "just because you like it doesn't make it a feminist show" and that is totally fine.  These women aren't feminist icons but they are women who could be like many women of the time trying to find their place.  Trying to find some self worth outside of the home.  And trying to figure out how to meet their husbands and children in a mutually satisfying and emotional way.

This show doesn't glorify the good old days when women were home cooking and waiting for their man while the men are out earning the money and going on jags.  This show depicts the ugly affects of patriarchy on both men and women and the difficulty breaking patterns that have been building for generation and the stress of hiding emotions and repressing it all.

Are those conventional or ultimate genitals?

The subject of transgender politics is really hot right now, at least in some circles.  Now, I don't pretend that I am in any way on the forefront of understanding all that is politically correct in the dialogue of trans rights, experiences and terminology but I do have some ideas about how it presents itself in my sphere of life.

There is a radical environmental group called Deep Green Resistance (DGR).  Their efforts are geared toward looking at (and stopping) the industrial civilization that is killing us all because it depends on the exploitation of the earth's natural resources as well as the backs of "the 99%."  One of their primary discussion points is that this out of control and out of balance way of living is deeply embedded in patriarchal structures that reward competition, oppression of women, emotional numbness, an unhealthy power dynamic that allows for exploitation, etc.  In this vein, some female members of DGR hold women-only meetings to discuss issues as they are experienced by women.  They made a decision not to allow transgender women (men who became women) to attend because they had grown up socialized as men and receiving said privilege and could not speak from the perspective of a 'woman'.  This sparked a forest fire of reaction that has divided the group, elicited a level of violent response that is pretty much unacceptable in any circumstance but especially this one, and has at best led to a lot of discussion of gender politics.

So where does the buddhism come in?  Derrick Jensen, founder of DGR, eventually chose to respond when he felt that the "truth" of the situation was being misrepresented.  The gist of his response was that trans rights groups are fighting for the continued support of a gender binary (that there is male and there is female with qualities associated with each) and he feels that it is the existence of this binary, that is purely socialized, that is creating the unhealthy society in the first place.  You can read more here but I will continue.  What I think he means is that there is a catch-22.  Trans people want the right to be recognized equally as the gender that they feel they are and the right to achieve the body (or 'sex') that society recognizes as fitting that gender.  They want to feel whole.  This is totally legit.  We all want that.  As a buddhist, I am trying to study my self and find my true self in order that I will some day feel whole, love myself exactly as I am, warts and all.  So one might ask, if we are fighting to get to a place where people can feel comfy in their own skin, then isn't changing your body to a different sex just supporting the gender stereotypes that are wreaking havoc on us all?  If patriarchy is making demons out of men and victims out of women why fight to be recognized as one of those when you could just be who you are with the skin you were born with?

So seriously, here's the buddhist part.  The conventional truth (the world our human minds can see and that language describes it) is that we are not in a time where we love each other unconditionally for who we are regardless of appearance, etc.  We live in a time full of aggression and socially accepted masculine and feminine traits and behavior, style, expectations and experiences.  The ultimate truth is that Derrick Jensen is right, there is no man or woman or masculine or feminine, there are people or sentient beings that co-create the world and our very existence depends on the presence of every other thing.  That WE ARE NOT SEPARATE.  We are all shimmering mirrors reflecting and expressing the perfection of existence.

But we cannot pretend and live like ultimate truth is all there is.  That would be like saying, I can take whatever I want from whoever I want because there is no separation so it's all mine or it's no one's.  There is both the conventional and ultimate truth and we have to hold both at the same time.  We have to live in the world where maybe someone is happier when they have a body that matches what they feel inside because they have no choice but to see themselves reflected in the eyes of society.  So while we may know there is a flaw to the logic that someone feels that they were born with the wrong body in the first place, we cannot invalidate their experience and deny them their attempt at finding wholeness.   I might go so far as to argue that the decision for some women's DGR meetings to exclude trans women may have a thread of logic to it but it will probably cause more harm than good to exclude people.  And finally, the Real truth is that we don't know.  We don't know whether the harm/good from any one decision is bigger/smaller than the outcome from a different choice.  We are all doing our best and deep down hurting people is something no one wants to do.

For the record, this issue is something Green Gulch hasn't really had to face yet (as far as I know).  So DGR is taking the bullet for many other groups that will indeed have to face this situation.  There has been the briefest of discussions about what would happen if a transgender individual wanted to come here as a resident.  One person of the older generation didn't really understand the problem.  Maybe they thought the individual would just use the bathroom of whatever sex they were.  This is assuming that they have fully transitioned and look like the gender they feel.  But what if we have a young person who identifies as a woman but still has a body that looks very "male"?  Which bathroom would they use?  Who would they share a room with?  It's like we'd have to choose who we want to make uncomfortable.  The trans person could room with who they want and use whatever bathroom that feels appropriate but what about the other people they share with?  How will they feel? Will they understand?  There's the interpersonal and community side of things (like we have to explore these issues and talk about our feelings) and then there's the practical side of things (do we need to build a new bathroom that is unisex? should a transgender person just have their own room?  do we have the space for that? is that isolating? fair?)

Stay tuned.  And in the mean time ask yourself, is buddha a man or a woman?

Poem for Summertime

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

- Li-Young Lee 

Your Flowers Are Talking - What Do They Say About You?

I just finished reading this book called The Language of Flowers.  It was lent to our garden manager who passed it on to all of us gardeners and ex-gardeners.  We loved it and read it in a day or two.  It's addicting and dramatic and tugs on the heart strings (reading the summary on the back is almost enough to make you put it down because of just how cheesy it sounds, try to overcome).  It is simultaneously light and intense at the same time.  Light in the sense that the structure is simple and not so subtle.  But it deals with heartbreaking topics like homelessness, foster care, single parenthood and basic human suffering, all with parallel experiences of natural beauty.

Yellow Rose - infidelity or jealousy
(this is a recurring image in the book)

              We first meet the central character, Victoria Jones, as she is leaving her final group home in San Francisco at the age of 18.  We quickly learn that she has anger and violence issues and has had no easy time since birth when her mother abandoned her.  The story follows her as she tries to figure out what to do with this new life, while having no high school diploma, no family, a case worker she evades when possible, and her only "skill" is a love of flowers, a scientific understanding of their growth and a thorough understanding of the ancient "language of flowers."  This relationship with flowers adds a beautiful tone to the novel as they often serve as a mode of communication or at least a time of respite from a world she cannot always handle.
              The novel is told in alternating chapters of present time and past episodes of her life and slowly brings them closer together to explain how she learned about flowers and what went to so wrong at a time in her life when she almost had a home.  There is a love interest too and he is related to her past, which makes it all the more juicy and ripe as an opportunity to explore reconciliation.  While she struggles to find her place in a world that has been hostile, she is lucky enough to encounter several supportive figures who love her in a way she was never able to love herself.  Great read!
              Seeing that I live next to a most amazing garden myself, I thought I would explore what our flowers say.  The book comes with an appendix of a flower dictionary.  I took to the garden with my notebook and a camera and here's what I found.

Iris - Message & Foxglove - Insincerity

Sweet Pea- Delicate pleasures

Peony - Anger

Camellia - My destiny is in your hands

Calalilly - Modesty

Poppy - Extravagance

This bouquet graces one of our altars.  Now of course, just because this language of flowers exists doesn't mean a flower or bouquet can't be appreciated simply for its magnificence.  This bouquet is beautiful and also could mean something very particular.  Orange roses mean "fascination," Dianthus (the red flower) means "make haste," and the Love-in-the-mist (blue flower) means "perplexity."  So perhaps if you had a flirtation going on with someone but the signs were confusing and you didn't know where it was going, this bouquet could say "I am fascinated and perplexed so please tell me your intentions." Or, "you're giving me mixed signals so 'shit or get off the pot'!"